Abstract

Abstract. Arti cial evolution is discussed in the context of a successful experiment evolving a hardware con guration for a silicon chip (a Field Programmable Gate Array) � the real chip was used to evaluate individual con gurations on a tone-recognition task. The evolutionary pathway is analysed � it is shown that the population is genetically highly converged and travels far through genotype space. Species Adaptation Genetic Algorithms (SAGA) are appropriate for this typeofevolution, and it is shown how an appropriate mutation rate was chosen. The role of junk on the genotype is discussed, and it is suggested that neutral networks (paths through genotype space via mutations which leave tnessunchanged) may be crucial to the e ectiveness of evolution. 1

Citations